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Research investigating the production, acoustics and perception of laughter is very rare. This is striking because laughter occurs as an everyday and highly communicative phonetic activity in spontaneous discourse. This workshop aims to bring researchers together from various disciplines to present their data, methods, findings, research questions, and ideas on the phonetics of laughter (and smiling).

The workshop will be held as a satellite event of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücken, Germany.

Papers:

We invite submission of short papers of approximately 1500 words length. Oral presentations will be 15 minutes plus 5 minutes discussion time. Additionally, there will be a poster session. All accepted papers will be available as on-line proceedings on the web, there will be no printed proceedings. We plan to publish selected contributions for a special issue in an international scientific journal.

Submissions:

All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by two reviewers. Please send submissions by e-mail to laughtercoli.uni-sb.de specifying ''short paper'' in the subject line and providing 1. for each author: name, title, affiliation in the body of the mail; 2. Title of paper; 3. Preference of presentation mode (oral or poster); 4. Short paper as plain text.

In addition you can submit audio files (as wav), graphical files (as jpg) and video clips (as mpg). All files together should not exceed 1 Mb.

Important dates:

Submission deadline for short papers: March 16, 2007 Notification of acceptance: May 16, 2007 Early registration deadline: June 16, 2007 Workshop dates: August 5, 2007

The laughter workshop will take place in the Centre for Language Research and Language Technology on the campus of the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The campus is located in the woods and is 5 km from the town centre of Saarbrücken.

Abstracts: Abstracts (for a 20 min. presentation) should be no longer than 500 words (including examples and references) and be sent as attached word or text document to Eva Schultze-Berndt by 5th November 2006.

Proposal text: The theme session will bring together evidence from different languages and disciplines to shed some light on features and criteria of human categorization manifested specifically in the classification of actions, states and events. This domain includes a wide array of abstract notions and concepts usually associated with verbs. Their representation in different types of classification systems has received much less attention than ''nominal'' concepts such as animals, plants or artifacts. The classification systems taken into consideration here manifest themselves in either (spoken or signed) language or script: - Numeral classifier systems, for nouns and for verbs; - Closed-class verbs functioning as classifiers in complex predicates; - Semantic determinatives in writing systems; - Event classifiers in sign languages.

The wide range of languages in which we find these classification systems allow cross-linguistic comparison along several dimensions. At the same time, the parallel existence of several classification systems in the same languages makes it possible to distinguish system specific features from cognitive universals.

Questions to be addressed in this theme session include: - What are basic concepts, i.e. basic actions, states or events in the different systems and languages, and are there universals? - What kind of domain structure do we find: e.g. prototype members, graded membership, typical taxonomical or schematic relations between the classifying and classified element? - Which basic features of actions, states or events - e.g. direction, speed, change of state, duration, repetition, agency, tools, human sensations etc. play a role in the different classification systems? Are they parallel to features found for living beings or artefacts, or do they form independent categories? - Are there correlations between the function or syntactic features of the different systems and semantic properties? More specifically: in languages using more than one of the classification systems, will they show a coherent picture or systematically system-specific characteristics? - To what extent can we find synchronic and diachronic variation? Are there universal tendencies of evolution, and in this case, can they be cognitively, culturally or linguistically motivated?
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